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Freshly printed Midori stickers just arrived, in November the last ones of the old batch were being given out to visitors of the OpenRheinRuhr. So I ordered new ones at FlyerAlarm, a print company based in Würzburg, Austria. This time around I went for circular ones and slightler smaller than they used to be. This size also fits better on phones and tablets for those who like to decorate theirs with stickers. You might also notice that the colors are better and the graphic comes out better – fixes to the SVG will be finding their way into the repository soon.

With the new stickers I’m well-prepared for Chemnitz Linux Days this march, in a little more than a fortnight. There will be a Midori booth there. Be sure to add the weekend of March 19 and 20 to your calendars!

As things go we diverged a bit from the original plan of making a big compatibility break with this release. Instead much of the original branch has been broken off into pieces that made their way into trunk. We did however bump WebKit2, libSoup and Zeitgeist dependencies. The most visible change is support for CSD, client side decorations, also called header bars after the API in GTK+3.10 (enabled via GTK_CSD=1). With no further adue here goes Midori 0.5.11 with a whole lot of nice things and a ton of bug fixes! Peek at the change log if you want more details.

Seven months of sweat and tears… oh well, not quite so dramatic. In any event Midori 0.5.9 is out!

We’re already scheming… I mean planning for the next cycle. We want to go WebKit2 and GTK+3 only now and do away with the fourfold compatibility setup. Anyone who finds this thrilling is more than welcome to join in; the fun is going to start soon.

At OpenRheinRuhr 2014 we had a Midori booth again. Almost didn’t happen due to the strike of Deutsche Bahn which caused many people to miss the event. Fortunately my humble self made it.

In addition to stickers, this time around we even had edible gummi paws!

Amongst the most posed questions was process isolation, something WebKit2 provides, and which will be available to everyone soon once our plan to move fully towards GTK+3, WebKit2 and Vala is put in motion. The other one was why Midori crashed so often – which is due to the at least 4 primary build configurations currently available. I’m very much looking forward to seeing this go away at some point in the future.

Pretty happy with the results personally, was able to get a decent number of people curious to try out Midori and in one instance even install it on site.

The answer is simple, Midori needs a Debian package maintainer! Thousands of Debian and Ubuntu users are facing the above situation, including lots of Raspberry Pi users. A single person stepping up to it can literally change the world at this point. Now if fame isn’t motivation enough, there may be a t-shirt to get.

Today is the day of Midori 0.5.8. Dedicated to Adblock and WebKit2. Rather than trying to meet fixed dates as we used to, we selected which goals define if the cycle is done. No more no less.

As liked, fast and efficient our Adblock extension was, the original maintainer isn’t around anymore and flaws were accumulating on a code base that wasn’t very accessible anymore. So long story short Adblock is rewritten from C to Vala, several classes and files instead of one monolithic entity, plenty unit test cases and real whitelist support. Add to that a statusbar icon for easy flipping filtering on and off and seeing whether anything was blocked on the site. If you had problems with peculiar display problems whilst using Adblock, chances are good they’ll be gone with the upgrade. Adblock is as always shipped with Midori so just be sure to enable it in the Preferences!

In other news WebKit2 is making another big jump and closer to the finish line. Text selection behavior, favicons, support for multiple rendering processes, opening new windows and setting cache and cookie paths correctly. There’s still work to do in the areas of extensions and downloads in particular, but we’re getting there.

We have working spelling corrections again. Right-click an underlined word and pick a suggestion from the menu. It’s that simple.

Two new extensions implement Ctrl+Enter to complete www. and .com and a handy little notes panel which automatically saves one or more snippets as you make changes.

Aaaaaand we’ve got a brand new file type editor (MIME type on Linux). Finally the user is in control of how files open, either via the Preferences or the right-click “Open With…” menu item.

As always see the file Changelog for more details. And stick around for a bit if your package isn’t there yet, it can take a while.

The avid user may have noticed the release is overdue, although scheduling a release over new year’s eve was probably a lost bet to begin with, so that’s why. The good news is we got some extra bug fixing time.

So what did we get done? A good amount of clean-up including a revamped notebook – this is tech jargon for the tabs UI – with the goal of reducing bugs due to different build configuration, regardless of whether one is using GTK+2, GTK+3, Granite or Windows. A good deal of dead code could be dropped and many things simplified. There’s also a new Database abstraction which you don’t see on the outside but improves error handling and reduces bugs by unifying how things are done.

Now this is all nice and boring, are there any actual changes? Yes! Session management, nicknamed tabby, again gets smarter about reacting to crashes by not loading the faulty website and running commands on the command line properly. Private browsing has also benefited from some bug fixing, such as not wrongly attempting to load favicons from disk and enabling the sidepanel, for example for downloads (or other panels from extensions, for the brave ones who use the command line to enable extensions in private browsing).

Oddly enough one very small feature we got which I find amazingly useful myself ever since it’s there: Close Tabs to the Right. You wouldn’t think it does much, but if you’re applying a workflow of search and open as many results tabs as you can, and suddenly find all but one very much obsolete, this is exactly what you need.

As always see the file Changelog for more details. And stick around for a bit if your package isn’t there yet, it can take a while.

The current experimental build has had mostly positive feedback so it will be the basis for the upcoming Midori 0.5.7 for Windows. As described in detail earlier WebKit and GStreamer were updated. This also contains the latest featureset from trunk which is entering freeze now. This includes refactored tabs, better font defaults, and a number of smaller fixes. Any testing now can help findings bugs before the next release!

Known Issues

Dark shadow on inactive buttons (gtk3 style issue)

Cursor does not change appearance on links/ textarreas (webkitgtk3 issue)